Most small businesses can't afford a photo shoot. A day with a working photographer in the UK costs £400–£800; useful retouching adds another £200–£400; the whole thing eats half a month's revenue for a shop. The maths usually doesn't fit. So they reach for the stock library, populate the site with smiling-woman-with-clipboard and man-pointing-at-roof, and the site looks like every other site in their trade.
We've never been able to bring ourselves to recommend stock. Stock photographs of generic businesses doing generic things make every site look the same; customers can clock the difference between a real photograph and a stock one in three seconds, and they don't need to be art directors to do it. Generic imagery is the single most reliable signal that a small business has phoned its website in.
Use your phone
The best imagery on small business websites is almost always from the customer's phone. The phone-camera quality on a 2024 iPhone or Pixel is honestly excellent for the kind of shots a small site needs — workshop in natural light, product close-ups, the team behind the counter, the front of house. The owner has the phone in their pocket already. The shot is free.
What stops most owners isn't the camera; it's knowing what to shoot. They'll send us a hero shot of the front door, taken at noon under harsh sunlight, with a delivery van parked across half the frame. The instinct's right — show the shop. The execution needs a small amount of guidance. Take the shot at golden hour. Take it from across the street, not standing on top of it. Move the bin. Don't crouch.
What we ask for
On a typical brief, the kind of imagery we ask the customer for is:
The front of the shop or workshop, in good light, head-on, no parked vans. A shot of the work in progress — the florist arranging, the cabinetmaker planing, the barista pulling a shot. A close-up of the product as it leaves the customer's hand. The team, where it's flattering. Anything else you have that you're proud of.
Five to ten phone shots is usually enough. The site is then composed around those photographs, in the visual register the brand calls for — they're cropped, they're tonally adjusted, they're held to the same exposure baseline as a magazine spread would. The result is honest. The shop in the photograph is the shop the customer is going to walk into.
When the customer has nothing
Sometimes the customer hasn't got a single usable photograph. They're a brand new business; the shop isn't finished; the work hasn't started; the team hasn't been hired. We get this brief about a fifth of the time, and it's where most agencies reach for the stock library.
What we do instead is generate imagery for the brief. Not photographs of identifiable real people; not photographs that pretend to be real. Plausibleimagery — a workshop, a counter, a still life, a product close-up — composed in the visual register of the brand, in the tonal range of the palette, at the kind of resolution and detail the layout calls for. The result is honest in a different way: it's not pretending to be a stock photograph of a generic florist; it's an illustration that fits this florist's brand.
The shop in the photograph is the shop the customer is going to walk into.
When the real shop opens, the imagery gets replaced — by the customer's phone shots, taken in the actual shop, of the actual product. The generated imagery is scaffolding for the launch; the real imagery replaces it as it accumulates. Most customer sites cycle through both states — generated at launch, replaced over the first six months by photographs the customer takes as the business comes alive.
What we refuse
We refuse stock libraries. We refuse generic businessman-shaking-hands shots. We refuse generated imagery that pretends to be a real photograph of a real, identifiable person. We refuse to put a face on a website that doesn't belong to the business. The line is honesty: the imagery either is, or could plausibly be, of the business. It never lies about what or who.
If you've an existing site with stock imagery you'd like rescued — start with our restoration dossier. If you're briefing fresh, the brief form asks for whatever phone shots you have — five is usually enough.